Life (8 page)

Of all the schoolmasters, the one sympathetic one, who didn’t bark out orders, was the religious instruction teacher, Mr. Edgington. He used to wear a powder blue suit with cum stains down the leg. Mr. Edgington, the wanker. Religious instruction, forty-five minutes, “Let’s turn to Luke.” And we were saying, either he’s pissed himself or he’s just been round the back shagging Mrs. Mountjoy, who was the art mistress.

I had adopted a criminal mind, anything to fuck them up. We won cross-country three times but we never ran it. We’d start off, go and have a smoke for an hour or so and then chip in towards the end. And the third or fourth time, they got wise and put monitors down the whole trail, and we weren’t spotted along the other seven miles.
He has maintained a low standard
was the six-word summary of my 1959 school report, suggesting, correctly, that I had put some effort into the enterprise.

I
was taking
in a lot of music then, without really knowing it. England was often under fog, but there was a fog of words that settled between people too. One didn’t show emotions. One didn’t actually talk much at all. The talk was all
around
things, codes and euphemisms; some things couldn’t be said or even alluded to. It was a residue of the Victorians and all brilliantly portrayed in those black-and-white movies of the early ’60s—
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, This Sporting Life
. And life was black-and-white; the Technicolor was just around the corner, but it wasn’t there yet in 1959. People really do want to touch each other, to the heart. That’s why you have music. If you can’t say it, sing it. Listen to the songs of the period. Heavily pointed and romantic, and trying to say things that they couldn’t say in prose or even on paper. Weather’s fine, 7:30 p.m., wind has died down, P.S. I love you.

Doris was different—she was musical, like Gus. At three or four or five years old, at the end of the war, I was listening to Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Big Bill Broonzy, Louis Armstrong. It just spoke to me, it was what I listened to every day because my mum played it. My ears would have gone there anyway, but my mum trained them to go to the black side of town without her even knowing it. I didn’t know whether the singers were white, black or green at the time. But after a while, if you’ve got some musical ears, you pick up on the difference between Pat Boone’s “Ain’t That a Shame” and Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That a Shame.” Not that Pat Boone’s was particularly bad, he was a very good singer, but it was just so shallow and produced, and Fats’s was just so natural. Doris liked Gus’s music too. He used to tell her to listen to Stéphane Grappelli, Django Reinhardt’s Hot Club—that lovely swing guitar—and Bix Beiderbecke. She liked jazzy swing. Later on she loved going to hear Charlie Watts’s band at Ronnie Scott’s.

We didn’t have a record player for a long time, and most of it, for us, was on the radio, mostly on the BBC, my mother being a master twiddler of the knobs. There were some great British players, some of the northern dance orchestras and all of those that were on the variety shows. Some great players. No slouches. If there was anything good she’d find it. So I grew up with this searching for music. She’d point out who was good or bad, even to me. She was musical, musical. There were voices she would hear and she’d say “screecher” when everyone else would think it was a great soprano. This was pre-TV. I grew up listening to really good music, including a little bit of Mozart and Bach in the background, which I found very over my head at the time, but I soaked it up. I was basically a musical sponge. And I was just fascinated by watching people play music. If they were in the street I’d gravitate towards it, a piano player in the pub, whatever it was. My ears were picking it up note for note. Didn’t matter if it was out of tune, there were notes happening, there were rhythms and harmonies, and they would start zooming around in my ears. It was very like a drug. In fact a far bigger drug than smack. I could kick smack; I couldn’t kick music. One note leads to another, and you never know quite what’s going to come next, and you don’t want to. It’s like walking on a beautiful tightrope.

I think the first record I bought was Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally.” Fantastic record, even to this day. Good records just get better with age. But the one that really turned me on, like an explosion one night, listening to Radio Luxembourg on my little radio when I was supposed to be in bed and asleep, was “Heartbreak Hotel.” That was the stunner. I’d never heard it before, or anything like it. I’d never heard of Elvis before. It was almost as if I’d been waiting for it to happen. When I woke up the next day I was a different guy. Suddenly I was getting overwhelmed: Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran, Little Richard, Fats. Radio Luxembourg was notoriously difficult to keep on station. I had a little aerial and walked round the room, holding the radio up to my ear and twisting the aerial. Trying to keep it down because I’d wake Mum and Dad up. If I could get the signal right, I could take the radio under the blankets on the bed and keep the aerial outside and twist it there. I’m supposed to be asleep; I’m supposed to be going to school in the morning. Loads of ads for James Walker, the jewelers “in every high street,” and the Irish sweepstakes, with which Radio Lux had some deal. The signal was perfect for the ads, “and now we have Fats Domino, ‘Blueberry Hill,’ ” and shit, then it would fade.

Then, “Since my baby left me”—it was just the sound. It was the last trigger. That was the first rock and roll I heard. It was a totally different way of delivering a song, a totally different sound, stripped down, burnt, no bullshit, no violins and ladies’ choruses and schmaltz, totally different. It was bare, right to the roots that you had a feeling were there but hadn’t yet heard. I’ve got to take my hat off to Elvis for that. The silence is your canvas, that’s your frame, that’s what you work on; don’t try and deafen it out. That’s what “Heartbreak Hotel” did to me. It was the first time I’d heard something so stark. Then I had to go back to what this cat had done before. Luckily I caught his name. The Radio Luxembourg signal came back in. “That was Elvis Presley, with ‘Heartbreak Hotel.’ ” Shit!

Around 1959, when I was fifteen, Doris bought me my first guitar. I was already playing, when I could get one, but you can only tinker when you haven’t got one of your own. It was a Rosetti. And it was about ten quid. Doris didn’t have the credit to buy it on hire purchase, so she got someone else to do it, and he defaulted on the payment—big kerfuffle. It was a huge amount of money for her and Bert. But Gus must have had something to do with it too. It was a gut-string job. I started where every good guitar player should start—down there on acoustic, on gut strings. You can get to wire later on. Anyway, I couldn’t afford an electric. But I found just playing that Spanish, an old workman, and starting from there, it gave me something to build on. And then you got to steel strings and then finally, wow! Electricity! I mean, probably if I had been born a few years later, I would have leapt on the electric guitar. But if you want to get to the top, you’ve got to start at the bottom, same with anything. Same with running a whorehouse.

I would just play every spare moment I got. People describe me then as being oblivious to my surroundings—I’d sit in a corner of a room when a party was going on or a family gathering, and be playing. Some indication of my love of my new instrument is Aunt Marje telling me that when Doris went to hospital and I stayed with Gus for a while, I was never parted from my guitar. I took it everywhere and I went to sleep with my arm laid across it.

I have my sketchbook and notebook of that year. The date is more or less 1959, the crucial year when I was, mostly, fifteen years old. It’s a neat, obsessive piece of work in blue Biro. The pages are divided by columns and headings, and page two (after a crucial page about Boy Scouting, of which more later) is called “Record List. 45 rpm.” The first entry: “Title: Peggy Sue Got Married, Artiste(s): Buddy Holly.” Underneath that, in a less neat scrawl, are the encircled names of girls. Mary (crossed out), Jenny (ticked), Janet, Marilyn, Veronica. And so on. “Long Players” are
The Buddy Holly Story, A Date with Elvis, Wilde about Marty
(Marty Wilde, of course, for those who don’t know),
The “Chirping” Crickets.
The lists include the usuals—Ricky Nelson, Eddie Cochran, Everly Brothers, Cliff Richard (“Travellin’ Light”)—but also Johnny Restivo (“The Shape I’m In”), which was number three on one of my lists, “The Fickle Chicken” by the Atmospheres, “Always” by Sammy Turner—forgotten jewels. These were the record lists of the Awakening—the birth of rock and roll on UK shores. Elvis dominated the landscape at this point. He had a section in the notebook all to himself. The very first album I bought. “Mystery Train,” “Money Honey,” “Blue Suede Shoes,” “I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone.” The crème de la crème of his Sun stuff. I slowly acquired a few more, but that was my baby. As impressed as I was with Elvis, I was even more impressed by Scotty Moore and the band. It was the same with Ricky Nelson. I never bought a Ricky Nelson record, I bought a James Burton record. It was the bands behind them that impressed me just as much as the front men. Little Richard’s band, which was basically the same as Fats Domino’s band, was actually Dave Bartholomew’s band. I knew all this. I was just impressed by ensemble playing. It was how guys interacted with one another, natural exuberance and seemingly effortless delivery. There was a beautiful flippancy, it seemed to me. And of course that goes even more for Chuck Berry’s band. But from the start it wasn’t just the singer. What had to impress me behind the singer would be the band.

But I had other preoccupations. One of the best things that happened to me at that time, believe it or not, was joining the Boy Scouts. Its leader, Baden-Powell, a genuinely nice man who was well tuned in to what small boys liked doing, did believe that without the scouts the empire would collapse. This is where I came in, as a member of the Seventh Dartford Scouts, Beaver Patrol, although the empire was showing signs of collapsing anyway for reasons that had nothing to do with character and tying knots. I think my foray into scouting must have happened just before the guitar really set in—or maybe before I owned one —because when I really started playing the guitar, that was my other world.

Scouting was a separate thing from music. I wanted to know how to survive, and I’d read all of Baden-Powell’s books. And now I’ve got to learn all these tricks. I want to know how to find out where I am; I want to know how to cook something underground. For some reason I needed survival skills and I thought it was important to learn. I already had a tent in the back garden, where I would sit for hours, eating raw potatoes and such. How to pluck a fowl. How to gut things. What bits to leave in and what bits to leave off. And whether to keep the skin or not. Is it any use? Nice pair of gloves? It was kind of miniature SAS training. It was mainly a chance to swagger around with a knife on your belt. That was the attraction for a lot of us. You didn’t get the knife until you got a few badges.

Beaver Patrol had its own shed—one of the other dads’ unused garden shed, which we took over and where we had planning meetings about what the patrol was going to do. You’re good at that, you’re good at that. We’d sit around and talk and have a smoke, and we went on field trips to Bexleyheath or Sevenoaks. Scout Leader Bass was the scoutmaster, who seemed ancient at the time but was probably only about twenty. He was a very encouraging guy. He’d say, “All right, tonight is knotting. The sheepshank, the bowline, the running bowline.” I had to practice at home. How to start a fire without matches. How to make an oven, how to make a fire without smoke. I’d practice in the garden all week. Rubbing two sticks together—forget about it. Not in that climate. It might work in Africa or some other un-humid area. So it was basically the magnifying glass and dry twigs. Then suddenly, after only three or four months, I’ve got four or five badges and I’m promoted to patrol leader. I had badges all over the place, unbelievable! I don’t know where my scout shirt is now, but it’s adorned, stripes and strings and badges all over the place. Looked like I was into bondage.

All that boosted my confidence at a crucial moment, after my ejection from the choir, especially the fact that I was promoted so fast. I think it was more important, that whole scouting period, than I’ve ever realized. I had a good team. I knew my guys and we were pretty solid. Discipline was a little lax, I must admit, but when it came to “This is the task for today,” we did it. There was the big summer camp at Crowborough. We’d just won the bridge-building competition. That night we drank whiskey and had a fight in the bell tent. It’s pitch-black, there’s no light, everybody’s just swinging, breaking things, especially themselves—first bone I ever broke was hitting the tent pole in the middle of the night.

The only time I pulled rank was when my scouting career came to an end. I had a new recruit, and he was such a prick, he couldn’t get along with anybody. And it was like “I’ve got an elite patrol here and I’ve got to take this bum in? I’m not here to wipe snot. Why’d you dump him on me?” He did something, and I just gave him a whack. Bang, you cunt. Next thing I know I’m up before the disciplinary board. On the carpet. “Officers do not slap” and all that bullshit.

I was in my hotel room in Saint Petersburg, on tour with the Stones, when I found myself watching the ceremony commemorating the hundredth anniversary of the Boy Scouts. It was at Brownsea Island, where Baden-Powell started his first camp. All alone in my room, I stood up, made the three-fingered salute and said, “Patrol leader, Beaver Patrol, Seventh Dartford Scouts, sir.” I felt I had to report.

I had summer jobs to while away the time, usually working behind the counter in various stores, or loading sugar. I don’t recommend that. In the back of a supermarket. It comes in great big bags, and sugar cuts you up like a motherfucker and it’s sticky. You do a day’s loading of sugar and you’re humping it on your shoulder and you’re bleeding. And then you package it. It should have been enough to put me off the stuff, but it never did. Before sugar, I did butter. Today you go in the shop and look at that nice little square, but the butter used to come in huge blocks. We used to chop it up and wrap it up there in the back of the shop. You were taught how to do the double fold, and the correct weight, and to put it on the shelf and go, “Doesn’t it look nice?” Meanwhile there are rats running around the back, and all kinds of shit.